for proposing the income-tax amendment. But the decision of 1895 fanned the fires of social discontent. It unmasked the motives of those opposed to an income tax. On the one hand, are those well able to bear the burden of taxation upon whom a properly administered income tax would to a considerable extent rest. On the other hand, are the beneficiaries of protection who fear that an income tax will deprive them of one pretext for the maintenance of the tariff. The glaring injustice of any income tax apportioned among the several states according to population, in conformity with the court's decision, made such a tax impracticable. One effect was to discredit the court itself. Another fact had a similar effect. In its first decision, the court divided evenly on certain of the points at issue. After reargument it stood five to four against the act on these points. Far from conserving the social order, the in come-tax decision did quite the reverse.
Professor Daniels says:
The decision or, more strictly, the decisions of the Supreme Court which killed the Income Tax of 1894 made a great deal of history, and unmade, or, at all events remade, a good deal of law. It certainly traversed legal expectation, it jostled the doctrine of stare decisis, it contravened previous decisions, and it discredited a good many dicta which had already become "blessed words" among authoritative text writers and accredited authorities on constitutional law. . . . The deliverance of the court can be explained only by reference to what has been happily termed "psychological climate.". . . The Supreme Court had reversed its own decision before, but except in the legal tender cases no modern decision had been reversed which bore very directly upon the stirring political issues of the day. But the court evidently had not been appealed to in vain upon the issue that the tax was a stride towards socialism, and the "weightier matters of the law" seemed to have been forgotten under the shadowy sense of dread which the dim specter of socialism invoked. The most venerable member of the court gave emphatic utterance to the feeling which moved him. "The present assault upon capital," said Mr. Justice Field, "is but the beginning. It will be but a stepping-stone to other, larger and more sweeping, till our political contests will become a war of the poor against the rich, a war constantly growing in intensity and bitterness.[1]
Probably the Dartmouth College case has been more often quoted than any other as indicative of the jealous care with which the Supreme Court safeguards property rights. But few decisions illustrate better the relativity of judicial decisions to the circumstances existing at the time and place. When the decision was handed down, business was still conducted on a very modest scale, and the era of the corporate form of business organization was yet to come. In view of the important respects in which the doctrine of charter rights has been modified in subsequent cases, it is probable that the decision handed down in 1819 would have been different if the industrial changes of the next fifty years had been foreseen. Some one has aptly said that the Supreme
- ↑ Winthrop More Daniels, op. cit., pp. 199, 200 and 206.
